Morris Kaberia celebrates after being released from prison (via Face2Face Africa)

Face2Face Africa recently published an interesting profile of the African Prisons Project, which provides legal aid to prisoners in Kenya and Uganda. Many imprisoned people can’t afford a lawyer or effectively defend themselves without assistance. APP runs legal advice clinics in prisons, and also offers a bachelor of law (LLB) degree through the University of London’s remote study program.

The state of legal aid in Kenya is patchy. The Department of Justice formed a pilot legal aid program in 2007, and it also proposed legislation to expand the program around 2015. However, the state of implementation is unclear, with many articles mentioning an action plan for activities, but few actual activities. Private organizations like Kituo Cha Sheria and Namati also provide some legal aid. I haven’t been able to find statistics on the proportion of Kenyan court cases where defendants have legal representation, but anecdotally the percentage still seems low, so there do appear to be gaps left to fill.

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/19/legal-aid-for-prisoners-in-kenya-and-uganda/feed/0rachelstrohmA Kenyan man hugs a woman, with several other smiling people standing around behind himInteresting academic articles for January 2019https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/17/interesting-academic-articles-for-january-2019/
https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/17/interesting-academic-articles-for-january-2019/#respondThu, 17 Jan 2019 13:05:51 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8339Continue reading Interesting academic articles for January 2019]]>Here are some recent papers which I’m looking forward to reading. They include updates on the DRC, the political economy of social protection programs in Kenya, taxation in Zambia, and bureaucracy in Peru.

During this past decade, four developments have altered the contours of the [Congolese] conflict, contributing to a perpetuation of violence and insecurity. First, Congolese political and military elites have become increasingly invested in conflict, rendering it an end in itself. Instead of promoting cohesion and discipline, the government has perceived its security apparatus primarily as a means for distributing patronage, only occasionally prioritizing stability. Second, with the end of the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) rebellion in 2009, and more dramatically since the defeat of the Mouvement du 23 mars (M23) in 2013, regional involvement has decreased and the Kivus have seen few foreign-backed rebellions. This, combined with the national political crisis, has led armed groups to switch the focus of their bellicose rhetoric away from Rwanda towards Kinshasa. Third, there has been a dramatic proliferation of belligerents from a few dozens to over a hundred, while at the same time armed groups have coalesced into often unstable coalitions. Fourth, and most recently, insecurity is becoming increasingly politicized as political turmoil reverberates in the Kivus, prompting elites to bolster their influence through armed mobilization.

Cooperative norms and behavior are considered to be essential requirements for sustainable stabilization and development in conflict-affected states. It is therefore particularly important to understand what factors explain their salience in contexts of war, violence and displacement. In this paper, we assess the role of historical political legacies. We argue that precolonial processes of nation-building have strengthened people’s communal bonds to an imagined community, and that these bonds continue to positively impact present-day cooperative norms and behavior. We investigate this argument using the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as an empirical case. We combine historical information on the location and the main features of the precolonial Bushi Kingdom with original georeferenced survey data to investigate variation in cooperative norms within and outside of the boundaries of the precolonial “nation.” We exploit information on people’s awareness of proverbs associated with the original foundation myths of the kingdom to assess the role of long-term norm persistence. We find evidence in line with our argument on the historical roots of cooperative behavior.

Power, and how it is exercised within social relations is pivotal in explaining policy change. However, its analysis as an explanatory variable in understanding social protection policy uptake processes in developing countries remains unexplored. Using two cases of cash transfer programmes in Kenya, we examine the dynamics of power relations in the uptake of social protection policies. This article contributes to recent scholarship examining the adoption process in African countries but in departure demonstrates that asymmetrical power relations between actors are/have been central to the uptake of the programmes. The study found that within social relations in the policy space, agents exercised power in three ways. First, by controlling the policy agenda by insertion of experts; second, by excluding other actors through a process of depoliticisation; and third, by influencing the preference of domestic actors through social learning.

How does a locally-managed conditional cash transfer program impact trust in government? On the one hand, delivering monetary benefits and increasing interactions with government officials (elected and appointed) may increase trust. On the other hand, it can be difficult for citizens to know to whom to attribute a program and reward with greater trust. Further, imposing paternalistic conditions and possibly prompting citizens to experience feelings of social stigma or guilt, could reduce trust. We answer this question by exploiting the randomized introduction of a locally-managed transfer program in Tanzania in 2010. Our analysis reveals that cash transfers can significantly increase trust in leaders. This effect is driven by large increases in trust in elected leaders as opposed to appointed bureaucrats. Perceptions of government responsiveness to citizens’ concerns and honesty of leaders also rise, and these improvements are largest where there are more village meetings at baseline. One of the central roles of village meetings is to receive and share information with village residents, providing some evidence on the value of a high-information environment for generating trust in government. We also find that records from school and health committees are more readily available in treatment villages. Notably, while stated willingness of citizens to participate in community development projects rises, actual participation in projects and the likelihood of voting do not. Overall, the results suggest little reason to worry that local management of a conditional cash transfer program reduces trust in government or the quality of governance—especially in high-information settings.

Pro-poor policies, such as cash transfers, hold wide appeal for politicians in times of economic crises because of the visibility and high level of international support available for such measures. The political returns to politicians from a widespread pro-poor policy are significant: they potentially expand their voter base. The highly visible link between the politician and cash transfers has mobilised politicians to invest in state capacity and reach eligible citizens. Methods of selecting eligible participants and delivering cash has allowed local politicians to gain electoral mileage from central government actions. In the longer term, it can be very difficult for subsequent regimes to dismantle far-reaching propoor programmes without risking high levels of unpopularity. Consequently, future governments try to establish ownership over the programmes by improving and/or expanding them.

What drives tax compliance among informal workers and does it affect demands for political representation? While these questions have been posed previously in political economy scholarship, there are few studies that examine these dynamics among informal workers, who constitute the majority of the population in developing countries. Contrary to assumptions that informal workers fall outside the tax net, they often encounter a variety of taxes collected by national and local authorities. Based on an original survey with over 800 informal workers across 11 markets in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, and interviews with relevant policymakers, this paper finds that compliance tends to be higher among those workers operating in markets with better services, providing support for the fiscal exchange hypothesis. Moreover, using a vote choice experiment, I find that those who pay taxes, regardless of how much they pay, are more likely than those who do not to vote for a hypothetical mayoral candidate interested in improving market services and stall fees rather than one interested in broader social goods, such as improving education and schools in Lusaka. The results suggest that even among a relatively poor segment of the population, tax revenue can be mobilized if the benefits of those taxes are directly experienced and that just the process of paying taxes can affect an individual’s demand for representation by policymakers.

We study how non-monetary incentives, motivated by recent advances in behavioral economics, affect civil servant performance in a context where state capacity is weak. We collaborated with a government agency in Peru to experimentally vary the content of text messages targeted to civil servants in charge of a school maintenance program. These messages incorporate behavioral insights in dimensions related to information provision, social norms, and weak forms of monitoring and auditing. We find that these messages are a very cost-effective strategy to enforce compliance with national policies among civil servants. We further study the role of social norms and the salience of social benefits in a follow-up experiment and explore the external validity of our original results by implementing a related experiment with civil servants from a different national program. The findings of these new experiments support our original results and provide additional insights regarding the context in which these incentives may work. Our results highlight the importance of carefully designed non-monetary incentives as a tool to improve civil servant performance when the state lacks institutional mechanisms to enforce compliance.

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/17/interesting-academic-articles-for-january-2019/feed/0rachelstrohmAn unexpected transfer of power in the DRChttps://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/13/an-unexpected-transfer-of-power-in-the-drc/
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Supporters of Félix Tshisekedi at a rally outside his party headquarters. (Photo via The Star)

I’ve written an analysis of the recent Congolese elections for Democracy in Africa. Beyond recounting the events of the election, I’ve tried to draw two broader lessons from it as well. The first has to do with the changing nature of presidential authority in the DRC.

[The transfer of power] demonstrates that even a strong president can’t hold on to power indefinitely in the fact of increasing diplomatic and societal opposition. Kabila has major advantages in the political game, including great personal wealth and command of the armed forces, who are regularly deployed domestically to harass protestors. Yet he only managed to delay his departure from office by two years, and couldn’t compel a sufficient number of voters to accept his chosen replacement. He also agreed to a peaceful transfer of power to his successor.

This is quite different to the days of the dictator Mobutu, who held on to power in the DRC for more than thirty years in the face of continual protests and diplomatic isolation, and only left when he was overthrown by Laurent Kabila’s rebel group in 1997.

The second has to do with the fact that unusual alliances are actually not that unusual in Congolese politics.

The fractious and personalized nature of Congolese electoral politics opens the door to unusual coalitions, such as that between Kabila and Tshisekedi. The electoral system is structurally designed to produce weak parties oriented around a single politician. It’s easy to register political parties in the DRC, and the country’s virtually non-existent private sector makes the perks of elected office look unusually appealing. The result is a proliferation of dozens of tiny parties contesting every election.

Once elected, politicians form an ever-shifting constellation of alliances as they seek to maximize their access to state resources. Seeing candidates come to an agreement across the aisle is not nearly as unusual in the DRC as it is in parts of Europe or North America.

I’ve recently started polishing up my Swahili with an online course called Swahii. It focuses on practical aspects of communicating in Swahili as it’s spoken in Nairobi, which is different in many ways to the Tanzanian Swahili that’s commonly taught in textbooks. For $60, you get unlimited access to the course materials, including lessons, pronunciation videos, and Memrise vocabulary quizzes.

So far the course has been exactly what I’ve needed for self-study. I did a year of Swahili lessons around 2015, so I had the basics, but needed to brush up before getting to more advanced topics. Unlike Rosetta Stone, which makes you do every module in order, Swahii lets you skip past the things you know, and revisit the things you’ve forgotten. I’m also a strongly visual learner, and struggle with auditory learning if I can’t read along with what I’m hearing. Swahii’s combination of lessons and videos was just right for this, and better than the private tutoring sessions I tried, which were mostly spoken with no accompanying text. Highly recommended!

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/11/learn-nairobi-swahili-with-swahii/feed/0rachelstrohmScreen Shot 2018-12-09 at 21.10.38“Kinshasa is only slightly better connected to the global economy than the North Pole”https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/08/kinshasa-is-only-slightly-better-connected-to-the-global-economy-than-the-north-pole/
https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/08/kinshasa-is-only-slightly-better-connected-to-the-global-economy-than-the-north-pole/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2019 13:36:48 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8258Continue reading “Kinshasa is only slightly better connected to the global economy than the North Pole”]]>This striking quote is from a recent profile of the city in CapX. Over at The Pudding, that observation sparked some interesting work visualizing the number of flights leaving from cities around the world each day.

Matt Daniels notes that Kinshasa, with its 13 million residents, has about 13 outbound flights each day. That’s just slightly more than Barrow, Alaska, which has 10 daily flights for its population of 5000 people. Conversely, over 900 flights depart from Paris each day (pop. 13 million as well).

As shown in the graph below, Lagos also has substantially fewer flights than one might expect given its size. In general, you’re better off predicting the number of flights from a city by looking at its economy, rather than its overall population. New York seems to be an outlier here because it’s a primary transit point between two wealthy regions (Europe and North America).

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/08/kinshasa-is-only-slightly-better-connected-to-the-global-economy-than-the-north-pole/feed/4rachelstrohmA map of the world on a black background. It shows the routes of the 900 flights that leave Paris daily, bound for destinations all over the world. Conversely,Two bar graphs. The one on the right shows the population of various global cities, ranging from Tokyo's 35 million to Bangkok's roughly 12 million. The graph on the left shows the number of flights each day leaving those cities. In general, larger cities have more flights, but this doesn't hold true for very poor cities like Lahore or LagosVisualizing Kinshasa’s populationhttps://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/05/visualizing-kinshasas-population/
https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/05/visualizing-kinshasas-population/#commentsSat, 05 Jan 2019 13:23:55 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8253Continue reading Visualizing Kinshasa’s population]]>I recently came across a fascinating post from The Pudding visualizing the populations of cities around the world as mountains. (H/t to Naunihal Singh, who shares lots of other similarly interesting things as well.) Let’s check out how Kinshasa’s 13 million people look compared to other places with similar populations.

What really stands out to me about Kin is its extreme concentration. Population density drops off dramatically as soon as one leaves the city. I recall being struck by this on a trip to Matadi a few years ago, where hours went by without passing any settlement larger than 10 or so houses.

Conversely, London’s population is much more evenly distributed both within the city itself and across the surrounding area.

Bengaluru points to yet another model for distributing the population. The city itself is densely populated, and surrounded by a lot of fairly dense towns, but relatively few people in between the towns themselves. This presumably reflects the larger role that agriculture plays in the Indian economy compared to the British. London’s suburbs stretch on without being interrupted by fields quite so often.

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/05/visualizing-kinshasas-population/feed/6rachelstrohmMap showing the population of Kinshasa as a red mountain. All of the surrounding area is white and largely devoid of people.Map showing London's population as a mountain. There's a large red peak in the city itself, but lots of smaller red peaks in all the surrounding towns.Map of Bengaluru, showing lots of high red peaks of population with less densely inhabited white space between themThe 25 best longform articles of 2018https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/01/the-25-best-longform-articles-of-2018/
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My year in Pocket

Continuing my tradition from 2016 and 2017, here are the 25 best articles I read last year, in no particular order. I share lots of snippets from the interesting things I read at Pocket if you’d like to follow along.

An Internment Camp for 10 Million Uyghurs. Meduza. “I was able to find a couple of surviving mosques, but locks held their ancient doors closed. Not far from the madrasah, which was also closed, a furrier sat at an intersection in traditional dress and crafted an Uyghur hat. Both the furrier and the hat were made of bronze. Real fur hats were sold in the city’s souvenir shops, but real furriers were now impossible to find. The marvelous ancient knives that had graced the city on people’s belts and in market stalls had also disappeared. When I greeted a few salesmen and used the word ‘pchak,’ they recoiled, and only one antiques dealer could find a heavy knife case in his stand. Inside were several sumptuous, ancient knife handles — the blades themselves had been cut off. Even when they buy everyday kitchen knives, Uyghurs are now obligated to brand the blade with a laser-carved QR code that identifies the knife’s owner. In Aksu, knives in restaurant kitchens are attached to the walls with chains.”

How E-Commerce is Transforming Rural China.The New Yorker. “Li pointed to a whirring speck in the sky. As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee. The children pointed their fingers upward, faces lifted, and cheered for the ‘toy plane.’ But no one else seemed terribly excited. A young man with gelled hair, who arrived as the drone was descending, said that, for a few weeks, these landings had drawn big crowds, but that people soon had got used to them: ‘Things change so fast around here, there’s no time to be surprised about anything.'”

Everyday Politics. Aeon. “The original Ming dynasty policy held that in every military household men serving as soldiers would eventually be replaced by their eldest son. In principle, the policy initiated a simple and endless cycle of conscription, but in reality families developed in different ways that complicated the basic selection algorithm. In many military households there were multiple sons; in others none. In the hope of reducing its overhead expenses, the state left it up to families themselves to decide who should fulfil their obligation. Different families faced this challenge in different ways. Families developed a range of strategies to address the lack of fit between their own reality and the demands of the algorithm. One common solution for a family with more than one son was to arrange for responsibility to serve in the military to rotate among the sons on a set schedule. When the rotation was complete, the cycle would begin anew. Such a system could continue for generations. This was the method used by the Cai family of Quanzhou – whose genealogy I collected in the village where their descendants live today.”

“Give Us His Breath or His Body.”Roads and Kingdoms. “In August 2004, twelve men left their village in Nepal for jobs at a five-star luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan. They had no idea that they had actually been hired for subcontract work on an American military base in Iraq. But fate took an even darker turn when the dozen men were kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists. Their gruesome deaths were captured in one of the first graphicexecution videos disseminated on the internet—the largest massacre of contractors during the war. Compounding the tragedy was the reality that their deaths received little notice. Why were men from a country so removed from the war, in Iraq? How had they gotten there? And who, exactly, were they working for?”

Inside the Haywire World of Beirut’s Electricity Brokers. Wired. “‘We cover where there is no state,’ says Abdel al-Raham, an owner and operator of generators in East Beirut. He began with a small generator, which he used to power his house, around the start of the civil war in 1975. But the generator was loud and noxious, so over time, as a gesture of good faith, he would give his neighbors a lamp connected to his generator. “Just enough for them to light their house and to make up for all the annoying noise,” he says. But because of his generosity, his wife soon became unable to run the washing machine. He went out and bought a new, bigger generator. Then shop owners nearby needed more power, and his brother came to him and proposed they split profits on the power they could sell to the neighborhood. Self-sufficiency turned into entrepreneurship.”

She Ran From the Cut, and Helped Thousands of Other Girls Escape, Too. The New York Times. “Ms. Leng’ete never forgot what her sister suffered, and as she grew up, she was determined to protect other Maasai girls. She started a program that goes village to village, collaborating with elders and girls to create a new rite of passage — without the cutting. In seven years, she has helped 15,000 girls avoid the cutting ritual.”

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave Trader. The New Yorker. “My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. ‘He was a renowned trader,’ my father told me proudly. ‘He dealt in palm produce and human beings.'”

What Putin Really Wants. The Atlantic. “But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful, organized, and led by an omniscient, omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot. Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first presidential campaign, in 2000, and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011, simply laughed when I asked him about Putin’s role in Donald Trump’s election. ‘We did an amazing job in the first decade of Putin’s rule of creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia,’ he said. ‘Now it’s just funny; how much Americans attribute to him.”

A Silver Thread: Islam in Eastern Europe. LA Review of Books. “The Sultan sent three thousand troops and a vizier to deal with them, but Musa killed them all, and some mercenaries too. So the time had come to summon Marko again. Marko was a Serb, a Christian, and a prince. He had a terrible temper and an enormous moustache.”

Blood and Oil: Mexico’s Drug Cartels and the Gasoline Industry. Rolling Stone. “All that has changed over the past few years, as Mexico’s drug-trafficking cartels have moved to monopolize all forms of crime, including fuel theft, muscling out smaller operators with paramilitary tactics honed in the drug war. Black-market gasoline is now a billion-dollar economy, and free-standing gasoline mafias are gaining power in their own right, throwing a volatile accelerant onto the dirty mix of drugs and guns that has already killed some 200,000 Mexicans over the past decade. The most violent year in Mexico’s recorded history was 2017, and some observers now say the conflict has as much to do with petroleum as it does with narcotics.”

Safe House. California Sunday Magazine. “Valentina isn’t a social worker or a therapist or a lawyer. She is an immigrant who opens her home to women whose husbands or boyfriends abuse them. The women who come are waitresses, saleswomen, fruit and vegetable pickers, housecleaners. Like Silvia, many are ashamed, reluctant to point a finger or to file for divorce. Most are undocumented, and before President Trump’s election, they went to Valentina when they didn’t know their rights or when shelters didn’t have space. Since Trump, even those with papers avoid shelters and mistrust the law. Silvia had stayed at Valentina’s house for a week, and now Valentina has taken to checking on her. She’s hoping Silvia will leave her partner, but she can’t predict if she will or how long it might take.”

Signs and Wonders.1843 Magazine. “López first saw sign language on an American television programme in 1977. During a trip to Venezuela to compete in an international track-and-field tournament, he managed to get his hands on a guide to the sign language used in Costa Rica and brought it back to Nicaragua. But oralism was enforced even more strictly at the vocational school than at Melania Morales – teachers were known to slap the hands of students caught gesturing to each other – and López’s instructors confiscated his dictionary. Undeterred, he snuck into the room where the teachers had left the book and hid it inside a folk-dancing costume as he walked out. Armed with the contraband dictionary, Lopez and some deaf friends began to gather regularly. At first, they tried to pick up the Costa Rican vocabulary. But trying to learn to communicate using a foreign rulebook felt unnatural: none of the group had ever used anything like those signs with their families or each other. ‘I didn’t identify with those signs,’ López says. ‘I felt the signs had to be something that belonged to us.’ As a result, they scrapped his dictionary, and began trying to make one of their own.”

Could An Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out.The New York Times. “After the 15-minute ceremony, I turned to everyone, without thinking, and began speaking as my uncle kept recording: ‘The last time my mom saw me in court, I was sentenced to nine years in prison.’ I wanted to say something about the journey. I’d already revealed too much. Miles, sitting beside his brother, paused and looked up. I could tell something confused him. He had questions in his eyes. He stared, listening, as I confessed the thing that I’d been holding back. What man wants to tell his child he’s done time in prison? But I had. And, in that single breath, I’d given him this: an image of his father as both a convict and an attorney.”

The Waiting Room. The Marshall Project. “The freed detainees will carry their possessions in plastic garbage bags, knotted and sealed. Any money they had when they were arrested will have been converted to a Cook County–issued check that is unusable for the “release and run,” as it is known. Some will have no idea which way to turn as they leave the jail, and no one will know what to do with a check. There is a currency exchange on Kedzie Avenue and 26th, but that is a 13-minute walk, past the desolate zone next to the 26th Street wall of the jail, where it’s not unusual to get jumped by gangs. The Popeyes at California Avenue used to be a good place to get your check cashed, and it was such a reliable sanctuary in the neighborhood that the sheriff’s department would send the newly released detainees there, making it a regular stop in the out-processing.”

The Real Origins of the Religious Right. Politico. “But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”

Híyoge owísisi tánga itá (Cricket egg stories). Carte Blanche. “Biologists used to have a comfortable dogma. We believed that everything about an organism could be found somewhere in its DNA. That is not wrong, but neither is it the whole story. Now I am here in the Natural Sciences Building, having discovered a new function of hormones in crickets. What I—an Indigenous woman and a scientist in defiance of every obstacle—have found is not limited to crickets. Researchers studying humans have found that our hormones, too, transcend generations and genes. What I have found may be new to biologists, but not to the peoples of what settlers call the New World. We have known for hundreds of generations that we carry our histories within us. They are part of who we are.”

Embarrassment of Obscurities. Times Literary Supplement. “Although NASA was at great pains to present these suits as the pinnacle of modern technological achievement (and indeed each comprised twenty-one layers of fabric, mostly new synthetics such as nylon and spandex), the reality was a little different. Each suit was also a marvellous example of skill and creativity; and it was, almost exclusively, the handiwork of women schooled in the frequently undervalued craft of textiles. The sub-contractor responsible for their assembly was ILC, a firm best known for making Playtex bras, girdles and nappies. Teams of deft-fingered seamstresses and pattern-cutters, working on Singer sewing machines, assembled the spacesuits stitch by painstaking stitch. When the firm received feedback that the prototypes were chafing, they began inserting sections of fluffy material usually used to line girdles; the nylon mesh used to prevent the rubber layer from ballooning in zero gravity had originally been developed for bras.”

The Untold Story of NotPetya, The Most Devastating Cyberattack in History. Wired. “Disconnecting Maersk’s entire global network took the company’s IT staff more than two panicky hours. By the end of that process, every employee had been ordered to turn off their computer and leave it at their desk. The digital phones at every cubicle, too, had been rendered useless in the emergency network shutdown.”

Ready for a Linguistic Controversy? Say “Mmhmm”. NPR. “Once upon a time, English speakers didn’t say “mmhmm.” But Africans did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor at Yale University who studies Africa’s influence on the Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans used to say ‘yay’ and ‘yes.'”

Orange or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange.”Literary Hub. “What happened between the end of the 14th century and the end of the 17th that allowed ‘orange’ to become a color name? The answer is obvious. Oranges. Early in the 16th century Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges from India to Europe, and the color takes its name from them. Until they arrived, there was no orange as such in the color spectrum. When the first Europeans saw the fruit they were incapable of exclaiming about its brilliant orange color. They recognized the color but didn’t yet know its name. Often they referred to oranges as ‘golden apples.’ Not until they knew them as oranges did they see them as orange.”

Slivers of Sciences in Homer’s “The Odyssey.”Discover. “One of the most common arguments is that Circe was feeding the crew jimson weed. While that sounds innocent enough, Daturastramonium, as it is known in the scientific world, belongs to the deadly nightshade family and contains high levels of anti-cholinergic alkaloids such as scopolamine, hyoscyamine and atropine. These compounds block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from interacting with its receptors in the brain. When this neurotransmitter is blocked, we can’t distinguish reality from fantasy, we exhibit bizarre behavior, and we can suffer pronounced amnesia. ‘Patients who consume this stuff often have vivid hallucinations and become seriously delirious,’ says Harvard Medical School toxicologist Alan Woolf.”

Tea if by Land, Cha if By Sea. Quartz. “With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say ‘tea’ in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and teein Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi. Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before ‘globalization’ was a term anybody used. The words that sound like ‘cha’ spread across land, along the Silk Road. The ‘tea’-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.”

How to Spot a Perfect Fake: The World’s Top Art Forgery Detective. The Guardian. “Like criminals of every stripe, modern forgers have kept easy pace with the techniques that attempt to trap them. The mismatch between the purported age of a painting and the true age of its ingredients is the workhorse of Martin’s technique. So forgers have grown more rigorous in their harvesting of materials, taking the trouble, for instance, to source wooden panels from furniture they know is dateable to the year of the fake they are creating. (The trick isn’t wholly new; Terenzio da Urbino, a 17th-century conman, scrabbled around for filthy old canvases and frames, cleaned them up, and turned them into ‘Raphaels’.)”

A Birth Plan for Dying. Longreads. “River’s birth was scheduled for September 26. She would be born in the same hospital where I had given birth to our daughter, whom I’ll call M, two years before. The staff were ready for us. A kind nurse checked us in at noon and led us to a delivery room with a small sign on the door — a leaf with droplets of water that looked like tears. It’s a secret code. It alerts everyone who comes in the room that your baby is going to die, so people don’t accidentally congratulate you for being there.”

Migration is What You Make It: Seven Policy Decisions that Turned Challenges Into Opportunities. Center for Global Development. “No case study or academic paper can—ever—spell out what ‘the’ effect of ‘immigration’ is. Asking this question has as little use as asking whether “taxes” are inherently “good” or “bad.” The answer depends on what is taxed and what the revenue is spent on. Those choices make the policy harmful or beneficial. The same is true of migration. But the world’s wealth of experience in regulating migration can still be a useful resource for setting better policy. We must ask a more fruitful question: how can different policy choices generate positive economic effects from immigration and avoid negative ones? Immigration is not inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Its effects depend on the context and the policy choices that shape it.

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2019/01/01/the-25-best-longform-articles-of-2018/feed/1rachelstrohmText on a green background reading "6.8 million words" and "92 books," and an image of a badge saying 'Pocket reader 1% club"What I’m reading for December 2018https://rachelstrohm.com/2018/12/30/what-im-reading-for-december-2018/
Sun, 30 Dec 2018 08:53:31 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8326Continue reading What I’m reading for December 2018]]>Cross-posted from my Africa Update newsletter. We’ve got positive masculinity in Mali, the triple-taxed business owners of Somalia, a bridge on the River Congo, the perils of not participating in the census in Kenya, and more.

Southern Africa: Malawi is considering an onerous bill for the registration of NGOs, with penalties including years in jail or fines of $20,000 for those who don’t comply. Congrats to Shamila Batohi, who just became the first woman to serve as South Africa’s chief prosecutor. Zambian firms are willing to pay more taxes if they actually see improvements in public services afterwards. In Zimbabwe, urban authorities are promoting cremation as room in cemeteries runs low, but many people are concerned that their dead ancestors will be angered if they’re not buried properly.

]]>rachelstrohmchristmasGraphic showing that some African countries offer visa-free entry or visas on arrival to almost all nationalities, while about 2/3 of countries require visitors to get a visa beforehandA middle-aged Haitian man in a dark suit jacket and jeans stands in front of an exhibit of his black and white abstract artworkCover of a book titled "the postcolonial African state in transition," by Amy NiangReflections on the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators Databasehttps://rachelstrohm.com/2018/12/26/reflections-on-the-worldwide-bureaucracy-indicators-database/
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 06:18:21 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8315Continue reading Reflections on the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators Database]]>The World Bank just released a new dataset on the quality of bureaucracy in 115 countries. Pam Jakiela wrote a great summary of it for the CGD blog, noting interesting findings such as the fact that the size of the public sector doesn’t vary as much as one might expect between rich and poor countries.

Ken Opalo also had a good take on the database, and the broader importance of understanding variations in bureaucratic quality:

If you think about it, a lot of the low-hanging fruits in development that could get many countries to lower middle income status and beyond — for example, agricultural productivity, petty manufacturing, rationalized construction sectors, healthcare, education, and water and sanitation — require a modicum of political stability, security, and mere copying and pasting of policy ideas from elsewhere (with sensitivity to local conditions and with some scope for experimentation).

]]>rachelstrohmSeries of four graphs showing that the radio of public employment to all employment, and public sector wages to all government expenditures, are fairly consistent between high, middle, and low income countriesPhotographing nature and people in Congo-Brazzavillehttps://rachelstrohm.com/2018/12/24/photographing-nature-and-people-in-congo-brazzaville/
https://rachelstrohm.com/2018/12/24/photographing-nature-and-people-in-congo-brazzaville/#commentsMon, 24 Dec 2018 18:08:32 +0000http://rachelstrohm.com/?p=8307Continue reading Photographing nature and people in Congo-Brazzaville]]>The New York Times recently reviewed Congo Tales, a new book about people living in the Mbombo region near Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo. As the Times summarized it:

A team including Pieter Henket, a Dutch photographer; Eva Vonk, a Dutch producer; Steve Regis “Kovo” N’Sondé, a Congolese artist and philosopher; his brother Wilfried N’Sondé, a Congolese writer and musician; and a group of conservationists and researchers spent five years in the basin. There, they collected and translated the tales of the people of the Mbomo region. The stories were then edited by the N’Sondé brothers, a job suited to the pair who grew up with stories passed down from their grandmother.

The resulting photos are stunning. A few of my favorites:

A young woman displays her family’s totem animal, a bird, by putting a leaf over her head

The Woman in the Moon is a story about how the days of the week were established

Young boys gather around the unofficial mayor of the village, in a setting meant to replicate a story about the importance of learning from one’s elders

]]>https://rachelstrohm.com/2018/12/24/photographing-nature-and-people-in-congo-brazzaville/feed/1rachelstrohmA young Congolese woman in a pink dress stands in front of a brick house, wearing a large banana leaf over her headA woman sits in a carved wooden crescent moon. She's holding her child, and another 30 children are gathered around herA Congolese man in an orange robe stands in the forest. He's surrounded by 15 young boys with green paint on their faces